Esssential Philosophy of Psychiatry

Thornton

This book is a concise introduction to the growing field of philosophy of psychiatry. Divided into three main aspects of psychiatric clinical judgement, values, meanings and facts, it examines the key debates about mental health care, and the philosophical ideas and tools needed to assess those debates, in six chapters.

Esssential Philosophy of Psychiatry

Thornton

Description

Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry is a concise introduction to the growing field of philosophy of psychiatry. Divided into three main aspects of psychiatric clinical judgement, values, meanings and facts, it examines the key debates about mental health care, and the philosophical ideas and tools needed to assess those debates, in six chapters.

In addition to outlining the state of play, Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry presents a coherent and unified approach across the different debates, characterized by a rejection of reductionism and an emphasis on the ineliminability of uncodified skilled judgement.

The first part, Values, outlines the debate about whether diagnosis of mental illness is essentially value-laden and argues that the
prospects for reducing illness or disease to plainly factual matters are poor. It also explains the important role of skilled contextual judgement, rather than a principles-based deduction, in ethical judgement.

The second part, Meanings, examines the central role of understanding and a shared first person perspective, both against attempts to reduce meaning to basic information-processing mechanisms and to explain away the difficulties of understanding psychopathology in recent models of delusion.

The third part, Facts, shows the importance of uncodified clinical judgements, both in assessing the validity of psychiatric taxonomy and in the application of Evidence Based Medicine. Despite advances in the codifaction of practice and operationalism of diagnosis, an
element of judgement remains in the assessment both of what, at one level, is good evidence for diagnosis and treatment and what, at a higher level, is good evidence for the validity of classification overall.

Esssential Philosophy of Psychiatry

Thornton

Table of Contents

Part I: Values 1. Anti-psychiatry, values and the philosophy of psychiatry1.1. The debate between 'values in' and values out accounts of mental illness1.2. Putting the debate into context1.3. A biological telelogical model of mental illness1.4. Mild cognitive impairment: a case study in philosophy of psychiatry2. Values, psychiatric ethics and clinical judgement2.1. A toolkit for ethical reasoning in medicine and psychiatry2.2. Judgement and the broader framework of Values Based Practice2.3. The role of judgement in the Four Principles approach to medical ethicsPart II: Meanings 3. Understanding Psychopathology3.1. Jaasperes on the role of understanding in psychiatry3.2. The attempt to understand
pscyhopathology in recent philosophy of psychiatry4. Theorizing about meaning for mental health care4.1. Cognitivism, the mind and inner states4.2. The discursive turn, social constructionism and dementia4.3. A Wittgensteinian account of meaningPart III: Facts 5. The validity of psychiatric classification5.1. Facts, Values and psychiatric validity5.2. Two complications for psychiatric classification5.3. Lessons from the philosophy of science6. The relation of Evidence Based Medicine in psychiatry6.1. The presentce of Evidence Based Medicine in psychiatry6.2. Hume's challenge to induction6.3. Responses to Hume6.4. The role of individual judgement in induction